Hard drive problems are most common when they are used in prolonged periods. It not only stores your personal files and data, but a hard disk’s primary duty is also to carry and run the operating system.
There are many factors depend on the speed of your PC. One of the primary factors is hard disk performance. If the hard disk performance slows down, you can see the effect on Internet performance, lags while performing tasks and everything which is running from hard disk data.
If you feel your PC is running slow due to of the poor hard disk performance, you can check it with these performance measuring tools.
These tools will let you know the performance of a hard drive by benchmarking its results. Apart from benchmarking, these tools also check the errors which are causing slow performance issue.
1. HDDScan
HDDScan is a free hard disk diagnosing utility comes with a variety of options. This tool works on hard disks, RAID arrays servers, SSD drives, and USB Flash drives. It tests the hard disks deeply and checks errors like bad sectors and bad block errors. This program works like your hard disk health diagnostics tool. Using this tool, you can check the health status of a hard disk and you will be able to prevent the sudden data loss caused by hard disk failure.
2. CPU-Z
CPU-Z is completely free to use utility to check the device hardware information. It collects all the installed hardware information and shows the details in its simple user interface. You can check every hardware information on the CPU-Z UI in the tabs. Each tab shows the PC info such as CPU, Caches, Mainboard, SPD, Graphics, Bench and about.
The info it shows is real time and you can check any hardware slowdowns as well. The detailed information of your PC is helpful to calculate the overall hardware performance including hard disks. This tool is useful for only checking the live performance stats of hardware, it won’t have any error diagnosing features.
3. Seagate Sea Tools
Seagate SeaTools is a hard disk performance checking tool from a very popular hard disk manufacturing company Seagate. This tool comes in two versions, one is for DOS and the second one is for Windows.
The DOS version of the program works on any Operating System. Whereas the Windows works on Windows platform only. These tools work for both internal and external hardware connections. These tools are very popular among professional computer technicians and easy to be used by anyone.
4. TestDisk
TestDisk is a very popular hard disk data recovery tool. It is an open source tool licensed under the GNU. When it comes to usage, the TestDisk works like a charm. It is designed to recover lost partitions, making non-bootable disks bootable again, and many other hard disks errors which make it hard to use the PC.
TestDisk is capable of fixing hard disk issues like partition table fixing, Rebuild NTFS boot sector, FAT tables fix, undelete files from FAT, exFAT, NTFS, and ext2 file systems. The program is compatible with DOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and SunOS. It is a pretty useful piece of software designed for both novice and advanced users.
5. Hard Disk Sentinal
It is extremely easy to use this tool for monitoring hard disk health and performance. Hard Disk Sentinel is designed to work with DOS, Windows, and Linux. It works with all types of hard disks, like SSD/HDD/SSHD, etc. This tool can check the health and diagnose the failures.
The user interface of the program is designed in a very easy way to understand. You can monitor the Hard disk health by the detailed graphs. The programs give you detailed information about the hard disks based on performance, health, and temperature. Hard Disk Sentinel comes in free and paid versions.
6. Ariolic Disk Scanner
Yet another interesting disk checking utility with a ton of great capabilities. This tool is portable and checks every nook and corner of your hard disk without disturbing your data. It supports both internal as well as external disks including Micro SD cards, USB Flash drives, CD and DVD.
It checks every sector on the hard disk to give a detailed report of the hard disk. Once the scan finishes, it shows the report with all bad sectors on your hard disk which are causing the issue. It is one of the smartest programs to monitor your hard disk health and performance.
7. HD Tune
HD Tune is a very interesting hard disk health analysis tool available for Windows. This tool is designed to check the drive’s performance by scanning error, health status, and live temperature.
There are many features added by the company whenever they release an update to the program. It has useful features such as analyzing transfer sizes from 128kb, improved OCZ support, accurate temperature detection, volume detection, support for hard disk unto 4TB and much more.
8. Macrorit Disk Scanner
Macrorit Disk Scanner is a disk analysis program comes with an easy to use interface. Everything is neatly organized on the program’s user-interface. When you start analyzing, it will show the complete details of the hard disk including scan area, elapsed time, number of error found, and transfer speeds. It scans sectors in the hard drive and marks the bad sectors as red for representational purpose. It is very easy to understand where the problem is occurring in the hard drive.
The program is portable and doesn’t need to be installed on the PC. It comes in free and paid versions. The free version works for personal/home use, whereas paid works with multiple disks at the same time and also you can use it for commercial purpose.
9. Smartmontools
Very lightweight and live disk monitoring utility available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for completely free. This tool shows real-time stats of your hard disk and warns about the issues. Installation of the program is pretty simple and in Linux, various commands are available to perform hard disk checking tasks.
The program intimates the status of the hard disk real-time while scanning. You can save your important files and data before any disastrous things happen to your hard disk.
10. Atto Disk Benchmark
Atto Disk Benchmark is a simple hard disk benchmarking tool. The results of the benchmarking can reveal the status of the hard drive you are using.
The simple user interface is an attractive feature of the program. It gives all the information about the hard drive clearly and even you can take a printout of the results. This program is suitable only for checking the health status of the hard drive, it is not coming with any diagnosing tools.
Summing up
These are the most popular programs to analyze your hard drive health. All programs listed above are very easy to use and comes in free versions.
What is your favorite program for hard disk performance scanning? Let us know in the comments below.